On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision VOICES OF HEAVENLY PEACE BY MARVIN KITMAN Before we are subjected to next May's special documentary??live telecasts of the President trotting around the Kremlin in his cotton...
...Cant is the philosophy of the East...
...Had TV's brains been washed and dried by the China Lobby...
...Their streets and squares are cleaner than ours...
...Can is the philosophy of the West...
...Walter Cronkite put the number at 300,000...
...He gets more people when he goes to a movie in New York," observed Eric Sevareid on CBS...
...Regarding the proper kind of TV coverage for an American President's first visit to Peking, the Chairman had said, "A warm and gentle wind blows from the West...
...3,337,658 liquidated in Suchow...
...4,320,631 in Yatsu...
...2,000,068 in Canton...
...Each event in a star's life, such as a marriage, is taken at face value without searching analysis of the past or projections for the future...
...Thank God "The Dick Nixon China Show" was often on at the wrong time of day (6 A.M...
...That was the purpose of allowing the trip...
...Nevertheless, the new China hands weren't in a wildly questioning mood...
...Although it may be hard for TV newsmen to make those miserable wretches into ogres, I'm sure they can do it if they all try...
...718,363 in Peiping...
...Television is not the Foreign Affairs Quarterly, which has time to go into all the nuances of things...
...A sage at 30 Rockefeller Plaza explained this to me: "It means the Chinese looked for maximum impact on American TV...
...We can still hate the Albanians...
...It also means that Mao wanted to open China to trade so that American TV sponsors would bring in their automatic washers, dryers and detergents, thus freeing millions to work in the fields and to serve in the Army...
...I consulted Mao's book of quotations...
...OnTelevision VOICES OF HEAVENLY PEACE BY MARVIN KITMAN Before we are subjected to next May's special documentary??live telecasts of the President trotting around the Kremlin in his cotton quilted jacket and sneakers??I would like to put down my thoughts on "The Dick Nixon China Show" (February 21-28, all networks, at all times...
...Nixon...
...A China-desk man at one of the network news departments offered the following explication: "Mao thinks large crowds are bad...
...I think I shall play my flute...
...I myself was on the brink when I saw the way the Chinese Army assigns 100,000 men to sweep the snow off the highways...
...The West, of course, turned blue as it followed the heart-warming story of how 800 million downtrodden Chinese people had thrown off the yoke of capitalism, pulled themselves out of the slough of poverty, ended starvation, reduced illiteracy, gained self-respect??all without U.S...
...Large numbers give me a headache...
...The squares in Peking aren't thai clean, these revisionists were now saying, nor are the people that orderly or that happy...
...And one is far too many...
...Had the networks included in their panels of experts a man like Bruno Shaw (who, in the Wall Street Journal last July, was calling Nixon the Neville Chamberlain of our time and warning that Taiwan would become the Sudetenland of the East), the commotion might have been enough to give the rest of the country gastric disorders...
...This was probably the reasoning behind China's approval of a television news pool...
...332,691 inKwang-li...
...How could this be true...
...By the end of the week, the (by then) old China hands were taking a noticeably tougher line on the People's Republic...
...As the Chairman said after the last cultural revolution, 'Don't let a thousand flowers bloom on TV.' Obviously he didn't want a lot of American 'experts' filling the air with remarks like, 'Peking looked much nicer in the old days...
...They found full employment, no crime, plenty of order, a friendly and contented people united under Hitler, and no sign of concentration camps...
...This thought must have crossed the reporters' minds, too...
...I know of at least one TV viewer who is thinking of turning Communist because of the networks' favorable picture-postcard coverage of China...
...Still, the pooling of thought among the network commentators aroused my curiosity...
...But the damage had already been done...
...Or perhaps TV was bending over backward to be polite...
...Having to go on the carpet to defend a favorable quote about wonton soup is just the sort of thing that could ruin a man or woman's career...
...The translation by Richard Lingeman, the poet laureate of Crawfordsville, Indiana, reads: As I listen to the music of the wind among the pines, Tears come to my eyes as I think of comrades dead and gone...
...The least those bastards could have done was provide a small crowd of school children with flowers??for Mrs...
...They pointed out that the school children looked like automatons...
...According to another interpretation, this was the subtle Chinese way of saying that hot air was coming from Washington...
...All I can say, Comrades, is don't be swayed by network cant...
...for millions of American workers to see how those people are suffering...
...All the commentators appeared jubilant at the news...
...All the networks, for example, reported Mrs...
...After all, half the country suffers from ulcers as it is...
...I don't think television was deliberately trying to make us soft on Chinese Communism...
...there was too much regimentation...
...For the past 20 years, television had taught us that the Chinese Communists were down at the heels, so weak from hunger and the lack of civil liberties that they were on the verge of being toppled by the legions of Chiang Kai-shek...
...All the women are virgins at marriage...
...The wretched Chinese now appeared to be a smiling happy people, great cooks and perfect hosts...
...The here was a lot of pro-Communist stuff on the air during the seven-day trip, especially about the food...
...1,345,879 in Cheng-lu...
...In Communist jargon," Shaw told me, " 'frank and serious' actually means 'quarrelsome.' It is their way of saying the talks wound up in total disagreement, with both sides yelling at each other, just short of a fist fight...
...The Generalissimo's timetable for retaking the mainland had never been revealed, but we assumed it was a military secret...
...There was always the possibility, I kept telling myself, that the tube was not showing it to us the way it really is ("One picture," it has been said, "is worth a thousand lies" ). The Chinese may actually be as miserable as we are...
...It wasn't until the next day, when I ran into a bona fide old China hand, Bruno Shaw, the former editor of the Hankow Herald, that I learned the poor showing was a deliberate insult...
...Barbara Walters of NBC explained during the visit to the Great Wall that it was built by 3,000 draftees in 10 years ("Another example of what people power can do...
...Broadcast journalism has a great tradition of being taken in by the hospitality of foreign governments...
...or 11:30 P.M...
...The poem even suggests that the spokesman should be known as The Voice of Heavenly Peace.'" I don't mean to imply that there weren't differences of opinion among the Voices of Heavenly Peace the networks sent to China...
...The morning after the first conversation between Dick and Chou, television viewers saw press secretary Ron Ziegler explaining that the talks were "frank and serious...
...in fact, the Communist way of life was wicked...
...From the very first days of the hit program's run, the commentators told American TV viewers, "The East is Red...
...The question that disturbs me is where will the remaining dedicated anti-Communists in the TV audience be able to vent their fear now that "The Dick Nixon China Show" has changed the world...
...Well, I sure hope the network China hands and Administration officials won't have to eat those words some day before a Congressional committee investigating who was responsible for winning China...
...The reporting of the 1972 Winter Olympics from Sapporo, Japan, continued the networks' heritage of seeing no evil...
...They spit in our faces in Peking, and TV told us it was raining...
...That's a great improvement on the imperialist way of having the military kill time by picking up cigarette butts and converting them into useless little balls...
...Every thinking and concerned American with an ideological ring around his collar must have been as shocked as I was by the way the networks changed their story...
...I next consulted a relevant poem by Mao in the leading Chinese literary review, Hsish-li (Steel Mill Quarterly), titled "Moonlight on the Yang-tze...
...It was comparable to the way the North Koreans drove up to the tent at Panmunjom the first day of the peace talks in a captured American jeep," Shaw noted...
...Or they are great actors...
...Why I remember this very corner had three shoeshine stands, an opium den and three houses of joy.' "The People's Republic wanted the reporting done by one official voice, like the Voice of Apollo at Houston, which would lead to the kind of high journalistic principles Americans are accustomed to getting from nasa on moon shots...
...They don't have traffic problems...
...For example, when radio covered the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, newsmen were free to roam the streets of Germany...
...The medium simply sees its journalistic responsibility as avoiding any agitation of the viewers...
...In short, what started out as an innocent campaign document for the President, a substitute for stumping New Hampshire, had turned into millions of dollars of free publicity for the Chinese Communist way of life...
...Nixon's controversial remark, "I love Chinese food anywhere, but it's especially good here in China...
...Rather, TV journalism's style of reporting is more like the movie fan magazines...
...An old-fashioned print-media man, Westbrook Pegler, was one of the few who saw anything amiss during that pageant...
...With the inferiority complex we all have about the President, nobody was surprised that so few Chinese turned out at the airport for his arrival...
Vol. 55 • March 1972 • No. 6
